Silence review

It was an act of astonishing arrogance, stupidity and cruelty: in 1947 the last colonial viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, appointed British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe to draw a dividing line across a country about which he knew virtually nothing. Partition led to horrific violence and mass displacement of people. Women were abducted, raped and mutilated, homes and cultures destroyed, friends, neighbours and families torn apart overnight.

Kavita Puri’s 2019 book Partition Voices is based on a BBC Radio 4 series, for which she collected memories of the cataclysm from members of the British-South Asian community who lived through it. This play – produced by the Donmar Warehouse and South-Asian theatre company Tara Theatre and commissioned to mark the 75th anniversary of partition – is adapted from Puri’s book by dramatists Sonali Bhattacharyya, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Ishy Din and Alexandra Wood. 

It’s crammed with vivid testimony, and yet, in a restrained production by Abdul Shayek, it never quite achieves the impact or richness that its torrent of traumatic experiences demands. Its title, Silence, refers to a decades-long reluctance to revisit unspeakable suffering and Britain’s slowness to confront its role in it. There are moments of eloquent stillness and muted agony, but the piece is structurally fragmented – its characters scantly sketched.

Rose Revitt’s design presents a series of canvas screens, which crowd the rear of the playing space and leave the cast little room to manoeuvre. The stage is carved into two by a piece of twine, bisecting a child’s chalk drawing of train tracks. “We never talk about empire – except for tea or the railways,” declares Nimmi Harasgama as Mina, a journalist pitching a feature on partition to her dubious newspaper editors. She sets out to collect eyewitness testimony from British Asians born under the Raj, among them her reticent father, gathering stories of pain, anger and atrocity.

The play offers an insight into a shameful and under-discussed, bloody slab of British history, but the journalistic framing device is creaky, delivered in flat first-person, direct-address narration – a flimsy construct on which to hang subject matter of such immense weight. It’s in the descriptive details that the writing is most powerful – jasmine-scented air and childhood games brutally disrupted by visions of bleeding bodies hanging from overcrowded trains or a severed head, pecked at by a crow, floating down a river. 

The ensemble acting is understated, tears silently stream down actors’ cheeks more than once. Bhaskar Patel as Mina’s pragmatic father, battening down his pain out of long habit, and Renu Brindle, as a retired doctor who can barely bring herself to speak of her past, are both especially memorable. Their words are shattering and necessary, but their accounts – like all of those here – deserve dramatisation of greater urgency and sharper focus.